Performance comparisons of approaches for providing connectionless service over ATM networks

Connectionless data from existing network applications compose a large portion of the workload during an early ATM deployment, and are likely to make up an important portion of ATM's workload even in the long term. For providing a connectionless service over the ATM network, we compare two approaches; an indirect and a direct approaches, which are adopted by International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication (ITU-T) as generic approaches. Our main subject of this paper is to compare network costs of two approaches by taking into account several cost factors such as transmission links, buffers, and connectionless servers in the case of the direct approach. Since the cost of the direct approach heavily depends on the configuration of a virtual connectionless overlay network, we propose a new heuristic algorithm to construct an effective connectionless overlay network topology. The proposed algorithm determines an optimal number of connectionless servers and their locations to minimize the network cost while satisfying QoS requirements such as maximum delay time and packet loss probability. Through numerical examples, we compare the indirect and direct approaches, the latter of which is constructed by means of our proposed algorithm.